Pleateau d?

With Win 7 being little more than a service pack for XP, with some new eye-candy and incorporation of applications that used to only be available as freeware, this new version of Linux seems to be following a similar line. It looks to be a fairly minor tweak of the previous version - which was itself only slightly different from the preceding release - which was .....

While the developers tend to add some support for a few new devices, maybe the latest N-core processors and roll the applications to the next version number, it's still the same old Linux we've had for 5 or 10 years.

WHERE'S THE NEW STUFF?

Have we reached the point where this is pretty much all there is: some incremental improvements in boot times (to negate the huge amount of bloat?) different coloured GUIs and themes and another sickeningly cutesy name, designed to chip even further at Linux's credibility in the business world? Or is everyone just too scared of FAIL to experiment with dramatic new user interface paradigms.

How about slapping a bit of AI into the O/S and maybe something to help users search their por^H^H^Hvideo collections - a sort of SQL for pictures.

If Ubuntu/Linux/Gnome/KDE <whatever> really wanted to set itself apart from the other desktop systems, an interface that just asked the user "what do you want to do?" and took real-language inputs (written or spoken), rather than having to click a series of buttons to walk an application towards the result you want, would be so radical that it would almost certainly crash and burn. However, if it did succeed, it would leave the others in the dirt.